LOCAL HONEY NEWS

The bees have been flying on warm days and are finding pollen. Spring is a dangerous time for honeybees.

A thousand or more bees emerge from incubation each day in each beehive, and they're all hungry. Cold snaps can keep mature field bees from foraging, and food stores from last summer may be running low. Starvation or dwindling is possible.

Young bees are vulnerable. They grow so fast that constant food is required for healthy development. If the beekeeper misjudges their pantry in the fall, they must now be given back their own pollen and honey set aside for the purpose, involving fair tedium, the lesson being don't take too much at the end of summer. This is basic organic beekeeping.

The quick, cheap and easy way out is to feed them high fructose corn syrup. The ensuing malnutrition is a common finding in CCD.

Millennium HONEY BEES

...back to basics.

Welcome to a work in progress - revision of March 2010.

This is a website about beekeeping - honeybees, honey, equipment and methods. Unavoidably, it's about beekeeping in the throes of a major crisis centered on the honeybees.

Most people are aware of the crisis and understand that something important is happening. Here's a very short summary. Click on World Bees for more.

Winter Losses

Honeybee mortality is measured by winter losses; historically, 5-10%. Colony Collapse Disorder - the name given the crisis - raised that to 30%, with losses up to 80% regionally. It's the same worldwide.

Crime Scene Investigation

CCD makes honeybees vanish. Similar events have occurred many times in the last hundred years, but never on the scale we see now. They are termed mysterious and usually remain that way.

So far there are more questions than answers. Is this a problem or a symptom? What is a cause, what is an effect? The consensus is against a single cause for CCD - more like a rogue wave that slams into honeybees as conditions build and subside.

Research is growing and organizing internationally. Malnutrition, pervasive pesticides, and the general poor health of honeybees mask and confuse whether imported parasites and viruses are causal. Synergies of old problems with new pesticides hit honeybees harder. Pesticides and GM crops are both found to have unexpected negative consequences.

A Perfect Maelstrom

CCD is described as a perfect storm, one condition after another contributing its maximum destructive force. The sun, atmosphere and oceans interact to form storms. Research is showing how policy, profit and choices interact to form CCD.

As the calamity eddies and flows, CCD smites and moves on.